Reform's 'Doge' Unit Will Struggle To Find Much Council Waste To Cut, Analysis Shows

Reform plans to roll out Elon Musk-style reforms to tackle what it calls "waste" (Alamy)

6 min read07 June

Councils now run by Reform UK spent up to 78 per cent of their service spending on social care and homelessness last year, analysis shows, suggesting there is limited room for further cuts.

Analysis carried out by PoliticsHome of council accounts in 2023-24 has revealed the cost pressures facing new Reform council leaders, as the party attempts to roll out its Elon Musk-style reforms to local authorities.

Earlier this week, the party announced it will send a team reminiscent of the United States Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) into local authorities to tackle "wasteful spending".

The US version had been spearheaded by X founder Elon Musk, before his public fallout with president Donald Trump.

The future of Reform's so-called "Doge-unit" was also thrown into doubt on Thursday when the individual leading on the work, Nathaniel Fried, quit his role.

Fried announced his exit just three days after the party launched its Doge unit, in solidarity with his former colleague Zia Yusuf, who resigned as Reform chairman on the same day.

Yusuf posted on social media that he no longer believed working to get a Reform government elected was a "good use" of his time. Earlier that day, he was at the centre of a party row after describing new Reform MP Sarah Pochin's PMQs question about banning burqas as "stupid".

Nigel Farage's party performed strongly at local elections last month, winning overall control in 10 councils.

The party said it would prioritise cutting waste at local level by reducing waste and doing away with diversity programmes.

Responding to PoliticsHome analysis, associate director at the Institute for Government think tank, Stuart Hoddinott, said that Reform councillors "will find themselves confronted with the same brutal trade-offs that other local authorities have been dealing with for 15 years".

PoliticsHome looked at accounts for Derbyshire, Durham, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire county councils, as well as Doncaster, North Northamptonshire and West Northamptonshire councils.

In these local authorities, between 51 and 78 per cent of council expenditure was spent on adult and children's social care and homelessness last year.

In 2013-14, after major losses to local authority funding, this ranged between 46 and 69 per cent.

In 2023-24, the highest proportion of spend on those services was in Staffordshire — almost 80 per cent.

In this local authority, analysis found that £521m was spent on those core services out of the total £668m in 2023-24.

The council spending the lowest proportion of its budget on those core services in 2023-24 was Durham County Council — 51 per cent — where £338m of the total £605m was spent on these services.

Responding to the figures, Hoddinott said it will be "very difficult for Reform councillors to find excessive waste in local authority spending".

The mounting pressure on local authorities has been well-documented in recent years, with difficulties fuelled in part by a rising demand for statutory services such as adult and children's social care.

The analysis carried out by PoliticsHome does not encompass all of the statutory services councils are expected to deliver — of which there are more than a thousand — such as library services, youth services and waste collection, and so does not set out a complete picture of the challenge Reform faces in its mission to find efficiencies.

On these so-called statutory services, Hoddinott said that while councils have a legal duty to provide most of those services, "the extent of the duty is hazy".

"There is no objective criteria for whether a local authority has met its obligations on, say, library services or adult social care."

Hoddinott said: "If Reform wants to release savings to fund things like road maintenance and bin collections, it will almost certainly have to look to the largest budget areas: adult and children’s social care.

"That would mean withdrawing care from people who are extremely vulnerable."

The analysis also excludes spending on special educational needs, as the pressure this places on council finances is different.

Reform has also spoken about making cuts to councils' head offices, something Hoddinott said would be "short-sighted".

He said that while the amount of spending accounted for in these areas was low, many of the jobs "save local authorities money in the long run".

He added that while cutting analysts might seem like it saves the council money, "they are the people who are working out how best to design services and where to target them in the most cost-efficient way".

"Without those staff, councils are effectively flying blind," Hoddinott added.

PoliticsHome analysis showed that for the Reform-run councils, spending on these central services sits between one to three per cent.

The net spend in this area, which includes the functions of the chief executive, for North Northamptonshire Council was £9.8m on these services (2.8 per cent of the budget).

The lowest spend was in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire County Councils — 0.7 per cent.

The IfG has said that most of the spending for diversity, equality and inclusion, also known as DEI, is likely to sit in the "corporate and democratic core" spending.

DEI was one of the programmes earmarked for cuts by Reform before the local elections were held.

But the savings that could be made here "pale in comparison to the pressures on local authority finances", according to Hoddinott.

"There is no magic bullet to solving the deep systemic issues in local government finance, but cutting those programmes will certainly not make a difference," he said.

On Reform's ambitions to cut council waste, a government source told PoliticsHome: “They’ll clearly only find small fry cash savings, so will they turn to the public investment that props up the most vulnerable? Or just end up settling for tinkering?

"Either way, their chaos will merrily kill the potential for economic growth.”

A Reform UK spokesman said that while the party understands the "difficult financial pressures" facing many local authorities, "we still believe that money can be saved through measures such as revisiting or cancelling contracts that do not deliver value for money, ending expenditure on vanity projects or reducing the amount spent on external consultants".

The spokesman said that FOI requests to councils ahead of the local elections campaign "uncovered a staggering amount of wasteful expenditure".

“This is exactly why we have set up the DOGE unit. The team will visit every Reform-controlled council and forensically audit local government spending to increase transparency and ensure taxpayer money is spent solely on activity that benefits local residents, such as adult social care, SEND provision and fixing potholes."